Preview — Gamification by Design
by Gabe Zichermann

Gamification by Design

What do Foursquare, Zynga, Nike+, and Groupon have in common? These and many other brands use gamification to deliver a sticky, viral, and engaging experience to their customers. This book provides the design strategy and tactics you need to integrate game mechanics into any kind of consumer-facing website or mobile app. Learn how to use core game concepts, design patternsWhat do Foursquare, Zynga, Nike+, and Groupon have in common? These and many other brands use gamification to deliver a sticky, viral, and engaging experience to their customers. This book provides the design strategy and tactics you need to integrate game mechanics into any kind of consumer-facing website or mobile app. Learn how to use core game concepts, design patterns, and meaningful code samples to a create fun and captivating social environment.

Whether you're an executive, developer, producer, or product specialist, Gamification by Design will show you how game mechanics can help you build customer loyalty.

Discover the motivational framework game designers use to segment and engage consumersUnderstand core game mechanics such as points, badges, levels, challenges, and leaderboardsEngage your consumers with reward structures, positive reinforcement, and feedback loopsCombine game mechanics with social interaction for activities such as collecting, gifting, heroism, and statusDive into case studies on Nike and Yahoo!, and analyze interactions at Google, Facebook, and ZyngaGet the architecture and code to gamify a basic consumer site, and learn how to use mainstream gamification APIs from Badgeville"Turning applications into games is a huge trend. This book does a great job of identifying the core lasting principals you need to inspire your users to visit again and again." —Adam Loving Freelance Social Game Developer and founder of Twibes Twitter Groups...more

Paperback, 208 pages

Published
August 19th 2011
by O'Reilly Media
(first published July 25th 2011)

Community Reviews

Solidly commercial in nature. Lucid without being incandescent. I felt like this is the book you would reach for as a sad Dilbert when your manager says "I heard we could increase our onboarding with a badge system... By next week!" and you don't have the authority to talk them out of it. The infectious enthusiasm and bubbling-over of ideas and possibilities of "Reality Is Broken" does not show up here to mar the pure unsullied pragmatism of this book. While I like pragmatism, I have never feltSolidly commercial in nature. Lucid without being incandescent. I felt like this is the book you would reach for as a sad Dilbert when your manager says "I heard we could increase our onboarding with a badge system... By next week!" and you don't have the authority to talk them out of it. The infectious enthusiasm and bubbling-over of ideas and possibilities of "Reality Is Broken" does not show up here to mar the pure unsullied pragmatism of this book. While I like pragmatism, I have never felt more deadened and turned off by the likelihood of freeze tag becoming PepsiTag. ...more

It was a bit boring... It's written as a manual and it lacks very interesting examples. But the information looks useful enough for me to consider coming back to it again while I'm working on a specific design that needs to be gamified.

It had the pragmatic enthusiasm of a marketer discovering better ways to sell things, not of an entrepreneur discovering better ways of serving customers.

Odd and misleading anecdote about the impact of leaderboards on Orkut's growth. Scant coverage of the potentially significant drawbacks to leaderboards, which is odd because the founders of Twitter have specifically talked about their decision not to include one.

Comparison of YI'm really interested in this topic, and was left cold by this book.

It had the pragmatic enthusiasm of a marketer discovering better ways to sell things, not of an entrepreneur discovering better ways of serving customers.

Odd and misleading anecdote about the impact of leaderboards on Orkut's growth. Scant coverage of the potentially significant drawbacks to leaderboards, which is odd because the founders of Twitter have specifically talked about their decision not to include one.

Comparison of Yahoo Answers and Quora was nice, as is consideration of Health Month.

The book is full of exhortations to go to the author's website for more information, and the book itself is light on information. Specific code examples for adding game elements to ruby forum software seem out of place, like the book is trying to do too much and failing at the theoretical and practical.

Even more unforgivable than the constant self-promotion is the final chapter - which has corporate sponsorship and is a giant ad for a white-label gamification service!

The reason I give it two stars is that I can see it being a useful introduction for someone with almost no first-hand knowledge of game mechanics in web apps. But if you've used Foursquare and Yahoo Answers, Quora and Health Month, there's not much here for you....more

Good books for summarizing gamified techniques. The book helps me to organize concepts and I realized what knowledge i have been missing. The last part about coding and platform can be skip by developers. Anyway, this is an interesting book.

Great overview of the basic fundamentals of thinking on how you can architect and design incentives to illicit the desired behavior from you users.

Frameworks can be used beyond "gamifying" apps. Having recently read Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness by Richard H. Thaler and Prof. Cass R. Sunstein, struck the similarities between the two books.

A great skim for those wanting for ways to think about the psychological profiles of your users.

A great read for those who areGreat overview of the basic fundamentals of thinking on how you can architect and design incentives to illicit the desired behavior from you users.

Frameworks can be used beyond "gamifying" apps. Having recently read Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness by Richard H. Thaler and Prof. Cass R. Sunstein, struck the similarities between the two books.

A great skim for those wanting for ways to think about the psychological profiles of your users.

A great read for those who are actually tasked with embedding these hooks into your app

A great toolkit that walks you through available tools to code hooks or use APIs to include loyalty modules....more

It is a good compendium of gamification patterns used in successful websites and companies.

I purchased the eletronic version and there are some things that bug me about this book: it has blocks inviting me to go to the same website in EVERY chapter. Apart from that, there is also an sponsored chapter. :-S

Anyway, if you plan to use gamification concepts in your product/website, this book is a must have.

Blech, a shallow treatment by someone who is using their knowledge of buzzwords to make a living. If you want your product to have the veneer of "gamification" without actually leveraging what make games compelling, read this book.